Where to Start When Messaging to Multiple Audiences
Are you marketing a service to more than one type of client or customer?
Do you have different services for different target markets?
Or are you marketing to multiple decision-makers in the buying process (i.e. a marketing manager as well as the CMO)?
It can all make for a mess of messaging across communications if you're not clear about who needs to know what and when and how.
Think about messaging to multiple audiences like an ice cream cone.
As a container for the ice cream, the cone is your foundational messaging. It's your brand positioning, your vision, your mission, and your purpose for doing the work you do. It's your experience and expertise and your unique points of differentiation. These are the things that hold true no matter what flavor of ice cream goes in the cone.
The ice cream is the messaging about a specific offer (product/program/service).
Each offer is a different flavor of ice cream. Your offers may share core characteristics (milk, fat, sugar) but look and taste different based on their own combo of ingredients. While you have only one type of cone (my personal fav is waffle), every offer you have is a different flavor of ice cream.
The toppings are the nuances in your ice cream messaging that make it particularly enticing for a particular audience. Toppings are unique to each customer type because each audience has a unique set of pain points, priorities, and motivations for change.
So let's say you have one offer (chocolate ice cream) and you're marketing that offer to two different audiences. Audience A might get chocolate ice cream with rainbow sprinkles and Audience B gets chocolate ice cream with marshmallows.
If you have separate offers for separate audiences, then Audience A gets chocolate ice cream while Audience B gets mint chip. Toppings may not matter as much in this scenario since each audience is already getting a different ice cream flavor.
I hope this ice cream analogy illustrates the distinction between layers of your brand messaging and explains why it can feel tricky to communicate the specifics in a way that lands well with your intended audience when you have multiple offers and multiple client types.
Whether you're in the midst of marketing to more than one audience or preparing to expand into a new market, the place to start (or revisit) is your ice cream cone—your core messaging. Getting solid on your brand positioning (company elevator pitch) and your overall value (experience, expertise, results) will give you a foundation from which to craft your ice cream messaging (offer specifics) and your audience's preferred toppings (pain points and motivations).
When you have clarity about your offers and your audiences, crafting language gets easier, building rapport and resonance with your audiences happens more quickly which of course increases potential for engagement and sales.
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